New Book About Fox News Launches Website To Fight Against Smears

Brett LoGiurato, provided by

Published 10:23 am, Monday, January 6, 2014

Random House will publish "The Loudest Voice in the Room" on Jan. 21, a book that promises to be an extremely controversial new look at Fox News from New York Magazine contributing editor Gabriel Sherman.

The publisher and the book's author are already preparing for the backlash. On Monday, a new website popped up to promote the book. According to Capital New York's Joe Pompeo, the site will also "be a source for pushback against misinformation throughout the book's release."

According to the website, Sherman drew on more than 600 interviews with "people who've known Ailes" in his reporting. That includes interviews with "hundreds of Fox News insiders."

The website features caricatures of many in Ailes' world — everyone from Rupert Murdoch, "The Mogul," to "Champ," described as Ailes' guard dog.

The push from Random House is out on the same day that USA Today's Michael Wolff is out with a piece entitled, "The Unbeatable Roger Ailes," which looks at Fox News' 2013 ratings triumphs. Last year, Fox's audience outpaced both MSNBC and CNN combined.

Wolff writes:

There is a sense, of course, of some virtue in the competition with Ailes. He is the antichrist, and his competitors, however more dreary and more puerile, are somehow God's better servants. CNN and MSNBC bang their heads against the wall, with their best public defense being that Ailes plays unfairly. But even when MSNBC came to play as unfairly, with tit for tat demagoguery, that didn't work. So it's something else.

In part, the answer is found in the numbers. The cable audience, for all the attention heaped on it for its theoretical political sway, is not that large.

The average Fox prime time audience in 2013 was little more than a million people. MSNBC's 2013 non-election-year prime time viewership was 640,000, CNN's 568,000 (but for the first time in two years, MSNBC fell behind CNN's daytime audience).

"The Loudest Voice in the Room" has been in the works for more than two years. Sherman did not interview Ailes for the book. Ailes gave nearly unprecedented access to Zev Chafets for the biography.